First Blood: Suda51’s The Silver Case Coming To PC

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Grasshopper Manufacture, the studio led by Suda51, has made some incredibly strange games. Often excessively violent and surreal, they’re the kind of things that capture my imagination immediately but often beat that same imagination to a pulp long before I reach the ending of whatever story they’re spinning. Killer7 is the only Grasshopper game that I love but I’ll always be interested to see what they produce next.

And, in this case, what they produced earlier – The Silver Case [official site] is the studio’s first game, originally released in 1999, and it’s coming to PC later this year. This remake will be the game’s first release outside of Japan.

If you’ve played No More Heroes, Killer7, Killer is Dead, or the majority of Grasshopper’s other games, you might be surprised by how conventional The Silver Case appears to be. It’s a point and click adventure with visual novel tendencies, and even though the story involves a serial killer and an organisation that is delightfully called the High-degree Murder Division, it’s not quite as bloodsoaked as later Grasshopper games. You certainly won’t be hacking, slashing and shooting enemies in any action sequences.

The upcoming version is billed as a remake rather than a straight port, but it’s not yet clear exactly which aspects will be altered, localisation aside. If it’s a success, we might see more early Grasshopper games make the jump – Flower, Sun + Rain, which takes place in the same world, would be a likely candidate.

What I’d really like to see is a remake of Michigan: Report From Hell. Not a remastered version but a completely new game based around the same concept. It’s a horror game played from the perspective of a news crew reporting on a mystery that quickly turns into a fleshy nightmare. You play as the person operating the camera and tag features of the environment to draw your presenter’s attention toward them.

It’s a janky game and the award of ‘erotic’ points for capturing upskirt shots of the presenter is grotty in a way that makes Killer Is Dead’s ‘gigolo missions’ seem like high art. But that central concept? Found footage films might be ten-a-penny, but I’d like to see at least one decent game about finding the footage in the first place.